Map meme ...

[fivemack]

It's a list of places I've been, and when. Probably people with memories better than mine are reading this (James? Mum?); if you notice omissions or can remember dates, I'll fix them.

Large countries far away

Russia (Moscow, St Petersburg 1992)

Australia (Sydney 2003)

USA (NYC, DC, Boston 1998; Baltimore, Seattle 1999; San Francisco end-2000 - conference at MSRI Berkeley; Minneapolis 2001,2002; Chicago 2001)

Canada (Montreal 2004, Vancouver and Victoria 1999)

That gets the really big blobs onto the map, and starts to exhaust my exact memories of which years I went where.

Europe

In 1996, I went with Rupert Beale, Jeremy Large, and sometimes Rufo Quintevalle, in a camper van, from Oxford to Rome and back via the Oktoberfest in Munich. This would have been more fun for all concerned if more than one of us could drive; it strained the friendship to breaking-point.

Germany (Regensburg, Nuremberg, Munich, Passau 2003 - visiting Louisa; Munich, road trip, 1996; Kufstein region hutting with Dad)

Austria (Kufstein region, hutting with Dad, June 2000)

Netherlands (Leiden 1999 - ANTS conference; Almera 1997 - http://www.hip97.nl)

France (all over the country, any number of times, family holidays from 1986 or so; also the 1996 road trip. Also a family holiday in Corsica in 1997, and an Easter in the Massif Central in 2000)

Italy (Florence, Pisa and Rome, road trip, 1996; Rome on a weekend with Mum a couple of years earlier)

Switzerland (wonderful hiking holiday / language exchange, probably 1993 but I'm not sure)

Belgium (a corner, on the road trip, 1996)

Spain (Madrid, weekend break with Mum, cannot remember the year)

Greece (family holidays; Crete the year of Hale-Bopp which must have been 1996, Kalamata and Sparta in 1999)

Norway (family holiday, in 1996)

Hungary (Budapest, family holiday, 2002)

Where next?

Prague for 1st May; the Baltic states sometime; Ireland to walk in the Wicklow mountains if I can find a companion. I've had vague thoughts of going to Bulgaria with my Russophone brother sometime. Poland: if my reaction to certain kinds of problems at work is "I can always give up and farm onions in Poland", I suppose I should go there and see what the onion-farming would be like. Somewhere on the Mediterranean where the snorkelling's good. That's enough travelling for several years to come.

I'm much less well-travelled than my parents, who have been to places that I know only as names in Flashman books - Kathmandu, Varanasi, Jaipur, Beijing, Inner Mongolia; planning Petra, Cairo, Luxor, Phnom Penh, Angkor Wat - though by the standards of any but the last fifty years I'm absurdly well-travelled for age 26.